Chapter 3 - The Bloodwork
Dr. Evans guided me into his quiet office and shut the heavy wooden door behind us. He laid a thick paper folder onto his desk and tapped a printed lab sheet.
"Mrs. Mendoza, we expected the malnutrition," Dr. Evans began quietly.
"We expected the blunt force trauma. But the comprehensive toxicology and genetic blood panels revealed something else entirely."
He pushed the paper toward me. I picked it up, my hands shaking as I scanned the complex medical jargon.
"What am I looking at, Doctor?"
"Your daughter-in-law has been systematically poisoned with heavy doses of synthetic organophosphates over a period of years," Dr. Evans explained.
"It causes severe neurological decay, memory loss, and extreme physical weakness. But that isn't the most shocking part."
He pointed to a secondary panel on the second page.
"Mariana's blood work shows high levels of rare, specialized immunosuppressants—drugs that are only prescribed to patients who have undergone organ transplants. But Mariana has all her native organs. She was never the recipient."
The pieces began to violently collide in my mind.
"If she wasn't the recipient... why was she taking them?"
"She wasn't taking them voluntarily," Dr. Evans said grimly.
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"Someone was administering them to her to keep her body compliant, while periodically harvesting her bone marrow and specialized blood plasma. There are puncture scars along her hip bones that date back six years."
I sank back into the chair, the room spinning around me. Rodrigo hadn't just isolated his wife to abuse her. He had turned her into a living, secret medical donor.
